As Marin County’s first poet laureate, Albert DeSilver set himself the goal of taking poetry out of libraries and lecture halls and bringing it to the places that inspire it – the mountains, fields and even beaches of Marin.

“We wanted to take it to public places, places you wouldn’t expect: Stinson Beach on a Saturday in July, or the mall in Corte Madera, or perhaps a gas station or two,” said DeSilver, of Woodacre. “We also wanted to go to some of the tourist sites in the Headlands, and to try to pull off a reading at the Mountain Theater stage. That will be a logistical challenge, but I’ll do my best to try and pull that off.”

To achieve that goal, DeSilver and sculptor Todd Pickering have created the Marin Poetry Chair, an armchair constructed from books of poetry that they hope will serve as a source of inspiration.

“It’s a physical representation of poetry that can travel from site to site and event to event,” said Argo Thompson, executive director of the Marin Arts Council, one of three agencies to commission DeSilver as poet laureate. “People can sit in it, write poetry, leave poetry there and read what other people have written.

“It’s there to spark a conversation about poetry, and to bring the extraordinary into the everyday,” Thompson said.

On Sunday, the chair will become the centerpiece of the Marin Poetry Festival in Sausalito’s Dunphy Park, featuring a reading by U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, a Fairfax resident and instructor at the College of Marin.

To DeSilver, the chair is an extension of a mission he began long before he became the county’s ambassador of poetry.

“I’ve been a poet and a teacher for many years, visiting classrooms, nursing homes and prisons,” DeSilver said. “After I was named poet laureate, I started thinking about ways of being a poet in the community that hadn’t been done before.”

DeSilver and Pickering scoured the used bookstores of Marin, searching for volumes that could support the chair’s physical and metaphorical weight. A box holding paper and pencils in the arm of the chair, for example, is fashioned from a book called “The Case For Poetry.”

“We wanted to choose books that are visibly poetry-centric,” DeSilver said. “So we went with a lot of anthologies, as well as works by Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson.”

By attaching the books to a welded steel structure, sculptor Pickering believes he’s created a chair that can withstand a year’s worth of use by would-be poets throughout the county.

“It’s going to have a lot of different lives,” Pickering predicted. “It might be sitting out in a field, or going to a shopping mall – places where people wouldn’t expect it. Most of them will look at it and pass it by, but hopefully some people will be willing to sit down and write.”

As the home of both Kay Ryan and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, who grew up in San Rafael, Marin has proven to be fertile ground for poets and poetry.

“Some of the world’s most renowned artists live right here in Marin, and the community has been the beneficiary,” Thompson said. “It’s been like an incubator; we have a really strong cadre of young artists who are benefiting from this place.”

DeSilver believes it’s the landscape of Marin that attracts those artists and fires their imagination.

“Poets are drawn to magical and dramatic places, and Marin has just that: an extraordinary landscape, with Mount Tam, the ocean, and one of the greatest cities in the world right there,” DeSilver said. “It’s a place that’s bound to draw artists and poets, and it has done so for years.”

While Pickering forged the chair in his Point Reyes Station studio, DeSilver asked a group of students to film a short documentary about the chair to be featured on a Web site, www.marinpoetrychair.org.

“It was a cool experience, because the kids got to see poetry as a more dynamic, community-involved operation,” DeSilver said. “It’s not about one person sitting around writing poems and being alone in their head. I’ve tried to reach out as an artist who facilitates happenings and occurrences, and that’s what the poetry chair is going to do.”

Since becoming the county’s poet laureate in April 2008, DeSilver has judged Marin’s high school poetry contest and introduced its Poetry Out Loud youth competition. He’s also participated in the annual Marin Poetry Festival and the Marin County Fair, where the poetry chair is expected to make an appearance.

“I think it’s a fantastic, wonderful, creative, engaging idea to celebrate poetry,” said Jim Farley, director of cultural and visitor services for Marin County. “We’re all poets, whether we know it or not. We all have words deep inside our soul to come out and be shared.”

In the end, DeSilver and Pickering hope to turn their chair of books into a book about the chair.

“That’s our ultimate goal,” Pickering said. “Al and I have worked together on books before, such as one about Lagunitas Creek. More people can read a book than get to a show, and it’s just fun to do.”

IF YOU GO: The Marin Poetry Chair will appear at the Marin Poetry Festival, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday at the Bay Model Visitor’s Center, 2100 Bridgeway in Sausalito. The $5 event will include U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, Marin County Poet Laureate Albert DeSilver, former San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman and other poets including Sharon Doubiago, Agneta Falk and Clive Matson. For information, call 382-8022.